Blockbusters

1.

In 1941, almost exactly five months after Hitler had offered to
end the war and a few nights before Christmas, a 2,750-pound German
bomb fell into a married London couple’s wooden kitchen, which was
already “flimsy.” But the bomb did not explode. Alf Fry and his
wife waited four weeks for the bomb to be dug up from the clay,
dismantled, and hauled away. But before that, they came to call the
bomb “Max.”

Max’s impotence was both normal and odd. As the war progressed,
bombs that large—named, quite literally, blockbusters—were more
commonly used by the Royal Air Force in night raids on German
military centers along its rivers or in Berlin. One killed 200 in
Berlin’s fashionable Hotel Bristol. And those R.A.F. bombs, which
needed to be craned into the planes’ bomb bays, were notoriously
volatile. Sometimes, they would not explode at all when deployed.
At other times, they unexpectedly would, even if being dropped in
safe zones with their detonation devices disarmed, and fall “to
earth like a fiery comet.”

But Max, an early and light edition (the R.A.F. bombs tripled in
size over the course of the war, from 4,000 to 12,000 pounds;
propaganda would claim the latter could blast an area of ten city
blocks), only destroyed a flimsy kitchen and a Sunday morning later
that January, when about a thousand neighbors needed to evacuate
their homes at 7:30 a.m. for his disposal. It only took an hour and
a half.

2.

At 29, John Horne Burns, who the Times
recently named “the great (gay) novelist you’ve never heard
of,” finished The Gallery on April 23, 1946. He then fell
upon his typewriter and, he said, “wept my heart out.”

The Gallery‘s narrator travels along much the same path
that Burns himself took as a G.I. in the war. And in the novel, he
recounts his time at an American cemetery at Saint-Jean de Fedhala,
in Morocco. To enter, a visitor or mourner had to bribe its
gardener with two cigarettes.

“The graves are plotted in neat rows,” he remembered. He saw
“how close and still bodies can be laid together in the earth. Over
each rectangle a white cross spreads its rafter arms. Most of the
crosses have dogtags affixed to them, giving each its relief from
anonymity.” He found some unmarked graves, and imagined that
“underneath must be the bodies of those who were blown apart by
artillery or drowned while still wading ashore.” Or, maybe, were
bombed.

In the beach town’s garden, after dark, “there was also the
largest woman in captivity, the French secretary to Fedhala’s
doctor,” who also looked after the doctor’s child. “We called her
Blockbuster.” She weighed 190 pounds, which she “carried” with
“offishness,” and “she insisted on deferential treatment to
discriminate her from the Ayrab wenches, who were far more natural
and amenable to reason.”

3.

The Brockton Blockbuster was mostly a right arm.

Its power was first seen on the baseball diamond at Brockton
High School (hence the locative) in the hometown of its owner, then
known as Rocco Francis Marchegiano—later simplified to Rocky
Marciano. His family would describe it as “rocket-like.” It was
later more frequently called “murderous,” when the Brockton
Blockbuster became the six-time undefeated heavyweight boxing
champion of the world.

At birth, he was 12 pounds. He grew into a “stocky” boy on his
mom’s Italian cooking. Then he was 188 pounds, when he fought Joe
Louis on Oct. 26, 1951. By then, his arm had swept floors in a shoe
factory and moved into pulling tacks from its shoes, punched Army
bags filled with stuffed rags as he waited for a deployment to the
Pacific front that never came (Marciano was honorably discharged
about a month before John Horne Burns wept on his typewriter), and
fought in 35 pro bouts, one of which, said his brother, ended with
him “sheering” his opponent’s “front teeth off at the nubs.”

In the eighth round of the Louis fight, the Blockbuster’s left
swiped across Louis’ jaw, causing Louis to stumble to the mat.
After a beat, Louis made it up first to his right knee, grasping
onto the lower rope, and then all the way up. The Blockbuster
bounced around, his head sometimes burrowing into Louis’ chest, and
threw uppercuts and pushed Louis back to the outside. Within
minutes, he threw a left, and then the right uppercut, which cued
him up for a final blow. Louis collapsed through the ropes, done.
That right ended his comeback. It made the Blockbuster famous.

About a year later, in the Brockton Blockbuster’s first attempt
at the heavyweight title, the right collapsed then-champion Jersey
Joe Walcott into an unconscious heap on the lower rope. While he
sat there, still nearly upright, the Blockbuster threw a gratuitous
left. As the count finished, Walcott fell into a crumpled fetal
position, the crown of his head touching the mat.

The Brockton Blockbuster did not lose once in his 49
professional bouts, 43 of which were knockouts, though reporters
did call one victory on points dubious and “a miscarriage of
justice.” That fight was against a boxer named Roland LaStarza; the
Blockbuster’s manager, Al Weill—who also was said to have
masterfully, patiently timed the Louis fight till Louis was weak
enough—was the fight promoter for the Madison Square Garden, where
the match took place. In a rematch three years later, the
Blockbuster’s right sent LaStarza through the ropes; LaStarza
endured a few more punches before the fight was stopped. Later, it
was revealed that the Blockbuster’s punches had broken blood
vessels in LaStarza’s arm.

Though he also once nearly killed a man in the ring, the
Brockton Blockbuster was generally considered a warm, gentle man
when he wasn’t fighting. In 1956, he had promised his wife he would
retire before the month of May arrived. And on April 27, having
retained his title the previous September with a knockout, he
announced his retirement. His left eye looking swollen and bruised,
Marciano said that he felt “perfect physically.” His brother would
say that he retired because he’d come to hate the smell of the
gym.

4.

In the July 14, 1962 issue of The Saturday Evening
Post, the magazine published an unapologetic confessional by a
white man known pseudonymously as “Norris Vitcheck.” He said that
he was a real-estate speculator who worked often in primarily white
neighborhoods in Chicago. But, as he initially introduced himself,
he preferred the “perhaps slightly” more “odious name” of his work:
block-buster.

He summed up his business:

“My function, which might be called a service industry, is to
drive the whites from a block whether or not they want to go, then
move in Negroes.”

This is how he did it: He targeted “old, middle-class blocks”
where “whites already… have been conditioned to insecurity by the
inexorable march of the color line in their direction.” He would
then buy one of the homes on the block, with a promise to the
owners and their neighbors: “Relax. I’m selling this through a
white real-estate man. I won’t even talk to a Negro.” Then, he sold
the home to “a Negro.” One by one, the white owners would
sell—”whether or not they can afford to move.” Within months,
non-whites occupied the entire block, as “Vitcheck” and the “more
than 100 in Chicago” who devoted themselves to this work made a
profit three times over:

“You may believe your home is worth $15,000, for example. If I
bust your block, I will expect to buy it for $12,000 cash… The myth
that “Negroes lower property values” persists—so whites run, and we
block-busters clean up. Within a few days comes profit No. 2: I
advertise and sell it to a Negro not for $15,000, but for $18,000…
[Then] the easy-payment plan, I believe it is called—that is, $150
to $200 a month until the contract is fulfilled. When is that? This
is profit No. 3, the big one. The contract is fulfilled when I have
been paid principal and interest totaling $36,000.”

Other block-busters—”If I operated so crudely, frankly I
wouldn’t have consented to write this report,” said “Vitcheck”—sped
up the process by having “Negroes with noisy cars” drive through
the neighborhoods or a poor “Negro mother” walk through with their
children or have people make phone calls to local houses asking for
people like “Johnnie Mae”—or simply whispering and warning:
“They’re coming!”

For his work, whites called “Vitcheck” a “nigger lover,”
“vulture,” “panic peddler,” and “Communist and un-American.” One
man said he “sold out” his “own race!” But at the end of his story,
“Vitcheck” defended himself in a series of questions directed at
his naysayers: “Am I really the basic cause of whites’ fleeing?”
And: “Would you help remove the pressure on ‘busted’ areas by
welcoming a Negro family into your own block?” And: “Whatever the
faults and whatever the social stigma I endure, I don’t believe I
am hypocritical about all this. Can you honestly say the same?”

5.

In 1974 and 1975, the two Milstein brothers played the New York
City Planning Commission against its own city-agency brother in the
Board of Standards and Appeals. They’d dreamed up a 43-story tower
for the Broadway stretch between West 62nd and 63rd Streets, right
across from Lincoln Center, despite it being far more “dense” than
what the area’s special zoning district permitted. Other
contractors were in the midst of building similar structures within
the set guidelines; Paul and Seymour wanted bigger, while lawmakers
feared that if the two prevailed, city zoning would be rendered
pointless. One Times editorial, beneath the headline
“Lincoln Blockbuster,” expanded the threat’s purview: “It is also
quite clear that the whole city loses if the Milsteins win.”

Which they did. The brothers maneuvered between the two city
agencies, like boys traversing climbing rings on a playground:
letting go of one right before its momentum turned against theirs
and then latching to the other. They skipped the standard practice
of submitting plans first to the Planning Commission, instead
jumping straight to the Board of Standards—only to withdraw their
application right before the board ruled and rerouted the process
back to the commission, where, eventually, a 5-2 vote favored their
special permit. (One commission chairman in favor was John
Zuccotti, who later became their zoning lawyer.) The vote was not
for a 43-, but instead a 34-story building—with 609 units, still
much larger than its surrounding competitors and 50-percent more
dense than any other building constructed in the city since 1961.
They named the resulting building 30 Lincoln Plaza.

This was what the brothers imagined and executed over frequent
lunches together at the Rainbow Room. By the time the 30 Lincoln
Plaza attempt began, the Bronxite and “frog”-voiced Paul, who wore
pinstripes and jewels around his pinkies, had already won a similar
gambit with the two agencies less than a decade earlier for his
42-story Dorchester Towers, which consumed the trapezoid between
Amsterdam Avenue, West 68th and 69th Streets, and the slant of
Broadway. Afterward, the chairman of the commission sued the board
to attempt to overturn its variance; he later remembered that the
brothers “beat us bloody in court.”

Among the brothers’ other properties—among them the Biltmore,
Roosevelt, and Milford Plaza Hotels—they came to own 1,964 units in
the Lincoln Center Special Zoning District. They raised prices. By
1979, residents lamented the area was becoming a “carbon copy” of
“the Upper East Side.”

In 2010, nine years after the quieter, elder Seymour died,
residents attempted to stop 30 Lincoln Plaza from transitioning
into condo units. Their argument hinged on the tower’s original
construction, alleging that the Milsteins forwent city permits and
added an extra floor, making the building seven feet too tall and
five feet and six inches too wide. Because of this lie (and that
zoning violations face no statute of limitations), the
approximately 20 tenants contended, the transition must not go
forth.

The building now consists of condos.

6.

In early December, 2011—a year after the renters of 30 Lincoln
Plaza protested and just shy of 70 years after a dud bomb fell into
a welcoming London kitchen—approximately 45,000 residents of the
German city of Koblenz were evacuated, including seven nursing
homes, two hospitals, and a local prison. A live British
blockbuster had been discovered in the bisecting Rhine River when
its water levels shrank back that November. The fuse was
corroded.

The defusers craned in 350 sandbags to surround the submerged
bomb. And then, with the city emptied, as the lead defusing expert
later explained, “I did my job, that was all.”

People returned to their homes. They were safe. The bomb was
gone. It did not have a name.

Nate Hopper was an Awl summer reporter in 2011. He now is an
assistant editor for Esquire’s website and weekly tablet magazine.
At time of publication, he has not seen Jaws. GIF by
Mathew
Lucas via Giphy.